It was 40 years ago that ARPA sent the first message ever between two networked computers. That officially marked the birth of what would become the Internet, arguably the most transformative event in human communications since the invention of the printing press.
One of the people involved in the project and a founding father of the Internet is Lawrence Roberts, who proved the concept of wide-area networking when he successfully connected two computers over a dial-up connection in 1965.
Executive Editor Tara Seals talked to Roberts about how the Internet is impacting the communications industry, 40 years after ARPANET.
Tara Seals: The Internet clearly changed people’s behavior in work and play. What does this mean for the communications industry?
Larry Roberts: The changes that are occurring are happening because people are being given more bandwidth, and continue to add more applications. This will continue as the network grows available capacity, and people keep finding things they can do with it. Moore’s Law is a constant. The entire network will end up assuming virtually all communications activities, so they will over time become much cheaper and more pervasive.
TS: What does the move to IP voice mean for service provider business models?
LR: Overall, VoIP is clearly working well, and eventually VoIP will totally replace traditional voice. And it can be encrypted and buried and hidden and be made unrecognizable by carriers. So, they can’t continue to make money from voice, only from data. There’s no alternative.
They can, however, add value to themselves by offering premium capabilities. They can eventually offer priority service in the network, which today they can’t offer very well, actually. But they will need to give different services different priorities on the network. For instance, take telemedicine – we have never been able to do this well but we should be able to, by offering priority to those applications. That way, there’s no fear of jitter leading to a wrong scalpel move.
TS: What do you think about the uptake of mobile VoIP?
LR: Wireless VoIP today is corrupted by delay. Wireless-access networks are almost always overcrowded. Everything breaks up because people are loading the network. That’s the way IP works – it loads it and keeps it loaded, then it controls the throughput rates of everyone by connection. Voice is competing with everything else, and if there’s too much traffic going in and out, it loses packets. This can be fixed by adjusting the network in congested periods, reducing everyone’s service a little bit to 99 percent available throughput [rather than letting them fight over who gets] the 100 percent [which means some users will have much lower speeds than others]. If they reduce everyone fairly, just a little bit, then everything works perfectly.
To read the full, in-depth question-and-answer session on our sister publication, VON, click here or on the source link below.
